A Bridge Too Far?

    A few weeks ago, we talked about “fairness.”  We expect God to at least be fair.  The world can’t function properly without some sense of fairness.  In the sermon, we reflected together how, in the end, we know that we need more than fairness from God.  We need mercy (getting what we don’t deserve).  But THIS parable seems to go too far with this.  Even if we put it in the category of “God’s thoughts and ways” and “human thoughts and ways” being vastly different, it is hard to reconcile this one.  They all got the same pay for differing amounts of work!

Theologian Gerhard Forde gets at this nicely: “It still sticks in the craw.  I could understand it, I suppose, if it fit nicely with what we would say about grace.  Grace, we say, is for sinners.  But the galling thing is that the parable doesn’t really seem to be about sinners.  It is about workers in the vineyard.  They weren’t sinning.  They were working.  If the parable had said that there were some big sinners and some little ones, but God nevertheless dealt mercifully with them all, I could see my way clear toward buying that it is all about grace — especially if I were a big-time sinner.”

But this is not what we get in this parable.  The response we will need to wrestle with this week is Jesus’ in verse 15: “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?”